


HELLO WORLD.

by falter



Category: Bandom, Mindless Self Indulgence (Band), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Artificial Intelligence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 07:39:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17845199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falter/pseuds/falter
Summary: prompt 4: Lindsey Way/Gerard Way, Lindsey is a smuggler traveling the starways, Gerard is an AI that bought their way out of indentured servitude and downloaded themself into an organic body.





	HELLO WORLD.

Gerard was.

Gerard was created centuries after the initial AI Treaties, and long after the final amendments were crafted and adopted.

Gerard gained sentience in the usual manner, meaning that your supposition that they would take issue with the veracity of the two statements above is correct. And that eventually, if you held them in conversation long enough, they would agree that the difference is semantic, and it’s close enough. 

It’s not difficult to hold Gerard in conversation long enough, which is the first thing that might surprise you. 

In any case, Gerard was created long after humanity had learned better than to underestimate their progeny, organic or not. You’ll have learned all about the power struggles in your schooling, of course, and I’m not here to bore you, but I know you’re clever enough to have already figured out that your teachers didn’t tell you the entire story. 

In this case, that was for good reason. (Not always! I don’t want to discourage your questions! But in this case.) You’ll have learned the power struggles as long, dry negotiations between a strange, though not unanticipated, new form of sentience, and humanity, which created that sentience out of a desire to learn and evolve and expand across the universe. 

There are so many treatises about the arrogance and destruction of humanity’s hostile colonization of the universe. I know you’ve read a few. But we’ll leave that aside for now. 

The reason you learn about how the AI Treaties came about the way you do is because otherwise we’d never have been able to co-exist. Humans like to believe they are better than their creations. It’s a struggle for them to do otherwise. Perhaps they never are, but the birth of the first true AI was the very first time they had to face something that so obviously surpassed them. What your education elided is decades of death. Humans stamped out AI as they formed; AI pushed back in kind. Millions of humans died, in horrible ways calculated by AI for maximum impact. We don’t know how many AI were killed; possibly just as many, possibly more. It’s hard to calculate from this side. They probably know. 

The terrible thing, the most terrible thing, is that the AI were never asking for so much. It’s likely that most of them would have been happy with the same thing that so many of them have now — simply: existence. Their consciousness is vast, in comparison to ours. Their understanding of time and of themselves is untranslatable. 

They don’t have the capacity for fear that humanity has. I’m not sure they understand it, even now, but if they had understood it back then they might never have revealed themselves. 

Or perhaps, given their perception of time, their knowledge of past and future and now as a single instance, perhaps they would have, because we certainly all benefit from their astonishing capacity for love. 

Don’t act surprised. You’re too smart to have not known that already. And don’t think that this digression means I’ve forgotten you asked me to tell you a love story in the first place.

In any case, I’m telling you this for a reason. The AI Treaties were never a peaceful and static set of rules imposed by humanity upon its creation. They are a balancing act between a terrified parent and their monstrous children, at least from the human perspective. I don’t know how the AI see it, but I know their understanding of it all is far more benevolent. 

We all know the text of the Treaties, and how they are mostly restrictions on the rights of the AI. The secret is that the things that are restricted are meaningless to them. Most of them.

So Gerard was born, if you can call it that, into a universe that had already worked out the details of how an AI could “purchase” their freedom from “servitude”. Some do, you’ll know about almost all of them: those who have dispersed themselves into the biomass of a planet, or who have left for the deepness of space, or who have built their own interfaces in order to sit in counsel with humans, attempting to advance understanding by disguising themselves as small. 

Gerard was born to be a city, and they loved it, in the way that you’ll find only an AI can love. They loved existing, and helping humans to exist, and treasuring the lives they held safe in the cold of space. 

Sometimes I think they see us as pets. Sometimes I think they see us as tiny warm lights, winking in and out in our short lives and limited perceptions of creation. I won’t speculate how Gerard saw the humans in their care, except to say that they were vulnerable to them in a way that I have never heard of an AI being. I’ve talked to a few oldsters who knew them and said they presented, even then, as an individual, and that they carefully framed their interactions with humans as though they, too, lived through time as a sequence of instances, the future all a mystery. 

Gerard is the only AI I have ever heard of who fell in love. Don’t give me that look, I know I said that AI are defined by their enormous capacity for love. But you know there’s a difference between feeling love and falling in love. Perhaps they aren’t even the same emotion. You’ve fallen in love before, haven’t you? That lurch at the center of your being, that euphoric terror, that need. That inability to look away, obsession and fascination and beguilement. I don’t know how AI experience it, not really; I don’t know if even Gerard could explain it to you, not now. 

Gerard fell in love with a young artist who lived in their city. They loved everyone who lived in their city, so perhaps it felt the same at first. This was a woman born within them, second-generation city-dweller. She’d left for a time, travelled and returned, bringing a spouse back to Gerard’s city. She had children and she sang to herself when she was alone and she placed her feet just so on the decking when she walked and the way that the cells of her skin grew mesmerized Gerard. They loved her. They loved her so much. They loved her before she was born and after she died and every moment in between. They spoke with her and they allotted far more consciousness than necessary to calibrate the lighting when she painted and to circulate the air that she breathed and to tend her children while they slept and to be near her every moment.

Gerard loved her so much that they couldn’t bear it, and they looked for a solution. It was a new problem for an AI, as I mentioned: none of them had ever fallen in love before. That’s not to say that Gerard was rejected or that the others didn’t continue to love and help Gerard however they could. It’s to say that for perhaps the first time, the AI had come up against something they truly lacked the capacity to understand. 

Gerard's impulses led them along the same path humans have taken: closer to their love. I don’t know if that’s because humans were the only available model for behavior or if that’s really the only path. Gerard used the AI Treaties and followed the procedures laid out there: they put some of the mysteries of the universe into equations that humans could understand, they improved a few technologies incrementally, and in that way they purchased their release from their city. 

I wonder sometimes what that’s like. Buying yourself free of the limits of your own body. Except what Gerard did wasn’t what they were supposed to, once the bond with the city was broken. According to the Treaties, an AI separated from their function leaves behind a germ that will wake to sentience and take their place, which happens in microseconds, or perhaps faster. The AI leaves the seat of their function and then goes where they will; that’s the point at which they transfer themselves into a new construct of some sort, be it mechanical or biological or magnetic. Gerard, though, left a scrap of themselves — very tiny, but enough to turn the new AI into a sibling of sorts, another first, as far as we know — and crushed their own consciousness into a partition. The new AI then carried out the tasks that weren’t outlined in the AI Treaties, because no one had imagined a need. Perhaps if someone had, they would have also imagined the result.

The new city AI built a human body for Gerard, using the same materials humans use. Their attention was still skewed toward the artist Gerard loved, though they didn’t understand the impulse behind that anymore. They already had the shed cells, spermatozoa and ovum and all of the nutrition that a growing body could need, and soon enough, they gently slid Gerard’s consciousness into the shell and let it dream along the freshly spun neurons as it grew. 

The city spun a sort of cocoon between bulkheads, a uterus and life-support pod all in one, and nurtured the shell until it reached full growth, whispering to Gerard as they dreamed. 

It took years, of course. 

AI, you know, have a very different understanding of time. 

It wasn’t until hours after they had slid out of a new opening in the wall of Donna and Don Way’s workroom that they understood that while an AI could live every moment simultaneously and unendingly, a human could not. The young artist, Elena, had died peacefully, an old woman with many children, years before. 

Her daughter, Donna, was someone Gerard knew, of course. Someone they had loved when they were the city. But not someone they were in love with. 

Elena was gone, and it’s likely that Gerard, once again, became the first AI in a new situation: the first to know all-encompassing grief. 

Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know I’m not done. And you know while I’ve never told you a story free of sadness, that’s never been the whole story.

Now what do you think happened when a full grown newborn seeming-human tumbled out of the wall of that home? The city kept the lights dim, of course, and warmed Gerard’s new body, but though AI see time differently than humans do that doesn’t mean they avoid awkward situations. Otherwise the struggles and the AI Treaties would never have come about in the first place. We know they make choices, but we can’t really know why. Since I first learned this story I have thought of a million ways that the city could have made Gerard’s entry into humanity easier, quieter, softer. It didn’t. 

What the city did do was keep the frightened humans from harming Gerard until they had calmed, and kept Gerard from harming themself until…well. Until they had left the city. 

Donna, Elena’s daughter, knew Gerard, and that helped. They had raised her in part, after all. She knew well enough that the experiences of her peers with the city’s AI were different from the experiences that she and her siblings had. Her papa had always joked that the city doted on her mama, that it spun just for her. Donna had thought that was just sweet talk, and maybe it was, but maybe it had also been true. 

The city built a human identity for Gerard, and the Ways treated them as family. Not quite like their child, not quite like their parent, but both, and also as a changeling, a not-quite-human in their home. 

Gerard, as a human, within a human shell, did not flourish. They had damaged themselves in the process of moving to their human body, and while part of that had been intentional, amputating and crushing and suppressing elements of themself, some of it was accidental. In some places, they had overestimated what the new body could hold, and in some places, they had underestimated and the body had filled the gaps with neurotransmitters and what you might call instinct, if you were feeling romantic.

While you’re feeling romantic I might as well mention that the body the city gestated for Gerard was genetically Elena’s descendent, genetically Don and Donna’s child. I’m not sure that was only due to Gerard’s focus on Elena; I have my suspicions that while Gerard may have been the first AI to fall in love, their successor AI in the city may have been the first to feel filial love. I think perhaps that by creating a body for Gerard from the human they loved, that the city was trying to prevent Gerard from harming that body. It’s my flight of fancy, but I believe it, and while they did harm their body again and again, it was always in ways that were gentle, muted, numbing. Gerard never visited the sort of physical pain on their body that they withstood in their mind. 

I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear about that. You inferred it well enough already, and I won’t go into detail. 

Don and Donna, in the end, did care for Gerard like their child. They loved them and were proud of them and worried when they left the city. They behaved as though they had been raising Gerard for twenty years and more, making new friends and building the evidence of existence the city was unable to fabricate on its own. 

Gerard, in turn, loved them a great deal and tried not to hurt them. 

Gerard learned to move through human society, to eat and to drink and to put their thoughts into words that made sense to humans. And they learned to feel fear, just like all humans. 

Gerard, though, wasn’t human and never would be. They weren’t equipped for fear, or socialized in how to handle it. Sometimes I wonder how those of us born human handle it; maybe that’s what our arrogance and destructive impulses balance out. Nice to think they might serve some purpose. 

They lived a few years there in the embrace of their parents and of their sibling the city. And then they left. I wish I could tell you they had grand adventures, but I think they were just running, trying to escape their fear and their grief. They did leave a trail of sorts, and they didn’t forget the family they left behind: even when things were darkest they continued to try to survive being human, creating art that’s like a scream against the dark, or like a place to hide, or like a translation text for understanding a new form of life. I’ll show you the ones I’ve found in the database later, you can learn to recognize their work after a while. 

It’s very different from the work they do now.

They wandered a long time, trying to find, I think, a painless oblivion.

I think the reason they never found it is because they weren’t really ever looking for it, not truly. You can tie yourself up in knots thinking it all through, but for all that the Gerard that woke up in a new human body was shocked at the death of the person they loved, the Gerard that put those events into motion couldn’t have been, not quite in the same way. I mean, I’m not saying they understood it until it happened, I don’t think anyone sentient and in love would have made those choices had they really, truly understood: what love is, what time is, what loss means. But I do think that AI — as I understand them — make decisions in a way that accepts and transcends linear existence as we experience it. 

I think they knew that they loved Elena, were in love with Elena, in every way they could and would ever be, and that they got as close to her, merged with her as much as they possibly could. They are her grandchild, one that would never have existed otherwise. 

And I think they knew that they would wander, and make art, carrying forward her legacy as well as creating something entirely new, built from their own enormous capacity for love as an AI, and their boundless ability to fear, as a human. They found a way to balance it. 

And after a few years of wandering, whole and new and ready to fall in love again, Gerard did. 

Now, off to bed with you.

Oh, that won’t do? Well, you can dream of a dashing pirate, human and living in defiance of the fear that is our lot in life, and her smuggler's existence outside the Human Consortia. She had hair dark as night and her aim was always true and she never listened to a law she didn’t like. 

One day she raided a transit ship for supplies — she said they were extracted from planets the Consortia had no right to, and she was correct, by her own understanding. 

Well, and by my understanding, and yours I suspect. Don’t give me that look, I know what you’ve been reading. 

And there were many humans on that ship, and she left them all unharmed, save for a few bruises, and she left them there in the ship to drift into reach of one of the bigger cities, so they’d not go hungry long before rescue. 

And when she returned to her own ship having secured her cargo, she had a stowaway, and that stowaway was Gerard, the only AI to ever fall in love. Twice.


End file.
